Kismet
by Superkawaiifreak
Summary: Tear me apart, and unzip my body. Take out my heart, as all heartless children do, and forget you ever had it. Fall in love. Tell me that you love me, then fly away. Peter/Wendy


Disclaimer: I do not own Peter Pan, or any related subjects.

AN: I wrote this a little bit ago, but I've fine-tuned it, and thus decided to post it to this site. I'm so seldom proud of my works, but I truly am prideful of this piece. T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Morten Lauridsen, and J. M. Barrie. The salt of the earth. Enjoy.

* * *

All children, except for one, grow up.

On a starry night in London, back when mothers and fathers still had nursery rooms for their children, and nightly bomb raids from the Germans were a bit too frequent, there was a young lady—for she had to be called a young _lady_, as a young _girl_ was young, by definition—who believed very much in other-worldly things. It is quite ironic—to discuss the meaning of a definition in the subsequent sentence explaining _children_. However, as time is wearing on, as it does so well in this city called London, this narrative is growing duller and is losing its gleam by the moment; alas, I will begin once more.

On a starry night in London, at approximately twelve o'clock, there was a young lady. She was sanguine, likable enough, and took to those cerulean dresses laced with sheer fabric at the waist. Her name? Her name is unimportant, for this has happened before. There have been many children in London who have been visited by that mischievous boy. And I say again; her name is therefore extraneously, irrefutably, and indubitably, _un_important.

On a stormy night in Russia, there was a young lady. Quite accustomed to the biting winters of the Russian nation, she placed a special emphasis on the sewing of fur-lined coats (real fur, of course, for faux fur was not worn back in the days of nurseries and bombings) and drinking warm, even hot, liquids. It was during an incredibly icy blizzard that her glass windows were blown open, with the curtains whipping violently, encircling her body like arms of a human being would, had the human being been large enough. The young lady's ash-colored hair fought in the crystalline wind, and all too soon her large azure eyes were peering into the eyes of a red-haired boy, who loosely clutched a dagger in his hand.

The spunky look present in this boy's eyes ignited a feeling of both dread and mystification within the girl. His hand was outstretched to her, palms up and pale, alluring her, persuading her, inviting her to the cold wilderness. Noting the strangeness of the situation, the young lady placed her hand into his and pulled down on his body hard. He fell. Swiftly, she rushed to her windows and slammed them shut, of course flecks of white snow dotting her ash-colored hair and decorating the oak of her bedroom floor. Turning back to face him, she realized that she was, indeed, standing upon his shadow—all too soon, the girl snatched it, grabbing the shadow by its foot, angering the red-haired boy.

"You are him, are you not?"

Smirking, "Well, girl, that depends. Who is 'him'?" he asked, feeling outsmarted for having his shadow stolen from him for the second time of his neverending life.

Rather than answer to him, the girl scanned her bedroom for a tinkling ball of light. She found none. Rather, she gracefully walked to her dresser, pulled out a needle and thread, then instructed the red-haired boy to sit atop her sleeping mattress. He did, quite—it is not his action of sitting, but the means of how he came to sit is what matters here. The boy launched from a sitting position on the oak floorboards to a standstill motion in the air and masterfully alighted atop the girl's bed—floating before her eyes!

"Seet steel, and I vill have this taken kare of briefly." She walked to her bed and sat abreast the boy; she took the bottom of his shoe, brought the foot of the shadow to his moccasin-clad foot, and began to sew the two together. Because this was the time when children still had nursery bed rooms with nurses, when bombing raids were all too frequent and there was little idea as to what was controlled chaos, the young lady's hands worked skillfully for a few minutes. Being pulled from the outside world, the glass of the windows gyrated in their positions, and an especially strong wind grappled the window pane. She ignored this by beginning a simple tune in the most resonant part of her vocal cords. A low hum, the luminous colors of vocal music soothed her jaded heart, and also distracted Pe—

And what a narrator I would be had I revealed his name!

He spoke, scratching his head in confusion. "This is… strange."

In an instinctively-thick Russian accent, "Vot eez?"

"Well…" He scratched his head.

Losing his thoughts, Peter tried again: "I just… I remember someone doing this," the pace of her sewing his shadow back to his foot quickened, "Someone… A long time ago…"

"Vot? Don't you know?"

"Well, sure, it's just, I've never thought about it before."

The trick of this situation was to only summon a wonderful thought. And one of the most wonderful thoughts that Peter could think of was his first encounter with the young lady that would forever change his life, and all concepts in it, one being that of the stuff of love, on that particularly starry night in London. You see, although it is not an entirely endearing gesture to sew one's shadow back to one's foot, it is the know-how and unspoken language that precedes this situation that matters. This Russian girl inveterately knew that no such adhesives like soap could reattach a shadow—but only that of old-fashioned principles, such as sewing, could. Inherently, she knew; just as the girl in London knew so long ago.

It struck Peter as something sanctified, in his own unique solipsism, that the ones he visited, the ones who knew how to save his shadow, were oftentimes the ones he never forgot. The ones he refused to ever say goodbye to. A _tumbalalaika_ of all sorts.

Peter opened his mouth to speak, a feeling peculiar washing over him. "I suppose that I recall a memory similar to this… Except the girl I'm imagining has light brown hair, wears a blue dress, and… something else. I think she gave me something."

The Russian girl nodded. "Veech vas…?" Her resonate voice trailed off.

"Heh," he shook his head, finding humor in his inability to communicate. "I don't know… But I do know it was better than any pirate's treasure in all the worlds." The girl tensed at Peter's last word, accidently stabbing herself in the thumb with her sewing needle. The red liquid thinly streamed from her finger to her bed comforter, staining her princess-white sheets. She bled. Peter didn't notice.

* * *

Tolling without end, the Big Ben clanged twelve times, signaling the late hour of the day.

"_But Peter, how do we get to Neverland?"_

"_We fly, of course." He stretched out his hand to the lady in the cerulean dress, taking note of the elevated warmth that her hand shot to his own. "It's easy!"_

_All too suddenly did his hair brown in color, his feet felt larger, and his vocal cords dropped, allowing his voice to speak more deeply and firmly. He took to the fact that his hand grew in warmth, but decided, this time, to notice how the daintiness of her hand appeared to affect his own body, his psyche._

_So this all signifies… what? He thought, unaware of his lengthened height. Big Ben tolled once; there was no thirteen o'clock here in London, no fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, or twenty-four o'clock here in Englad. Hours were only counted in the preteen digits. But Peter didn't notice._

* * *

To die will be an awfully big adventure, Peter once said.

Once light-brown hair had transformed into a rested smoke color, billowing, and the woman's lifelong attire of cerulean dresses changed to white robes. Although in her later years in life, the old woman exuded vibrancy from her eyes and beyond. The woman still walked about her old English neighborhood, promenaded to and fro her garden, which was dotted with flagstone pathways, and sewed. The garden, she learned, reinvigorated her senses, and allowed a deeper spirituality of human connection to the earth on which she was situated. And her sewing—her talent at this trade was unparalleled. Since she was a little girl, this woman designed her own dresses, sewed stitches on shoes back together, fixed her mother's pea coats for parties, helped the Nurse patch holes in her brothers' clothing, and tied her anomalous family together with her jubilant smiles and joyful laughs.

However, age had harnessed her physical body; at ninety-two years old, she felt some trouble in walking, though she had never touched a cane in her life. Sometimes her joints cracked without the intention of pushing two bones together to close that gaseous space in the anatomy of things. On some days, rising from bed proved to be a difficult task, but only because she disliked hoisting herself up with the aid of forever-still objects surrounding her.

And yet, despite her fairly regular life full of grandchildren, children, and a husband, she found herself above the clouds, bouncing on their buoyant fluffiness and floating through the midnight skies. Pure, luminous colors, fighting the silent shadows of the night; traveling through the slicing layers of air beneath her lithe body, being lifted higher into the stratosphere. Finding closure for all of her questions she had ever conjured in her lifetime—

"Mother, what _ever_ are you doing?" Jane asked.

Realizing the dire position she was in, with her scraggly arms stretched out every which way, her visage toward the sky with closed eyes and breathing heavily, the woman knocked her smile from her face, attempting to return to the ground of her large London house. "Oh, Jane, darling," she smiled good-naturedly, "I'm only stretching my arms and neck—this old body of mine…" she concluded, as if truly giving an answer to Jane's inquiry.

But Jane did believe this answer. So did Danny. As did Jane and Danny, their teenaged children did, as well, and even Jonathon, the woman's husband, believed these foolish answers. Accustom yourself to the fact, however, that the woman was an awful good liar—fancy yourself as to where she learned the skill?—so not too much blame can be plastered onto her narrowly-perceiving family. The woman simply necessitated someone to tell her when to stop these intrusive—isulting, more accurately—fabrications. She simply did not know where there was a limit—to the lies, verity, the sky, to anything.

But when the woman would commence her thinking to analyze what happened when the twelfth hour tolled at her London house that night, she would dismiss it, too stricken to really ponder the difference of what was and what could have been, compared to the life she found herself deteriorating in now.

* * *

"_And where are we off to?" A girlish voice inquired._

"_To London, ma'am." Peter bowed a bit, and tipped Hook's hat to the girl in the cerulean dress, gentlemanly acknowledging her presence and her previously-asked question to return "home." Home was… London, correct? Peter didn't know._

"_Oh, Peter!" She felicitously cried. "Boys! Boys! We're going home!" The young lady exclaimed, gathering her two brothers to celebrate their much-needed return to England._

_The flight back went well enough. As captain of the ship, Peter Pan took to steering Hook's prized vessel. Coated with gold dust, the boat lifted from the waters of Neverland, and began to torpedo through the air, back to the most northeastern portion of the sky. Of course, this torpedoing through the air was minimally noticed by the ship's crew, for when one is traveling on an object of extreme speed, the movement is unnoticeable, just as you and I cannot feel the constant rotation of the Earth spinning on its axis. Peter's ship was much like that. The actual traveling was unfelt, and it was only when something went wrong that one noticed anything was even occurring._

_That is not the case with this tale, however._

_Peter gracefully landed the ship outside of that particular London household, alighting it where the girl told him to set anchor. Still donning Hook's grandiose feathered hat, golden robes, and sharp sword, Peter hastily threw down a plank of wood so that Michael and John—the little brothers—could walk from the ship to their room. He instructed the Lost Boys to quietly aid Michael and John—and quietly!—in walking safely to their London home._

_Holding onto that stirring he had felt many moons earlier, Peter approached the girl on the ship, easily spotting her by her distinct choice of dress. They did not speak. Instead, Peter, with his other-world abilities, veiled the now-empty ship in a coat of golden light, curtaining them in their own unique, synthetic world. He fixed his unruly clothing so that the girl would do more than acknowledge his being, but feel proud, impressed, even, by his sole appearance. _

_She smiled. "Hello, Peter." Tingling and delicate, her articulation was._

_Taking her hand, he brought her dainty English fingers to his lips, returned her hand, and bowed his head to her. "Hello, Miss." Before either could fumble any other words from their mouths, Peter locked eyes with the girl, as if in confirmation of the stirrings he felt in his chest._

"_So you do feel them, Peter." It was a statement to which he replied "yes." And when that word left his lips, Peter instantaneously felt himself grow a great few inches, and his entire physicality matured. He did feel these stirrings—and he had hoped so ardently that she would reciprocate them._

"_Wendy, so will you accompany—"_

"_No."_

_She would never return to Neverland. She could not fly without his aid, no matter how powerfully she chose to believe in her heart, and in his, too. Living on Earth is what Wendy was given—and because it was the age in which people believed in old-fashioned values like personal honor, nobility and promises, she, too, knew that the air running beneath her arms was from a good world, that where she lived was a benevolent one. Her life was here on Earth, even if it meant being away from him._

_Without contentedness or understanding, Peter had a look of revolt. He felt ashamed of himself._

"_I… don't understand your choice, Wendy."_

"_I don't expect you to, Peter."_

_Angrily, he pointed to the plank, unveiling the ship of the golden rays he had used to shield them in prior. The amber hue of the ship dissipated as Peter's magic reverted to the likes of his shorter self (temporarily, of course). Silver stars ripped through the amber light. Rather than walk to the plank, the girl wrapped her arms around Peter's shoulders, desiring to hear that beating heart one last time before crossing the threshold to the pragmatic world where she would spend the remainder of her life._

"_Wendy," he began, "don't expect me to say goodbye. Because goodbye means going away, and going away means forgetting, and I won't ever forget this. Not ever." It was spoken with both derision and sadness._

"_I would hope not, Peter."_

* * *

"Well, get on with it, girl!" Peter, quite boyishly, ordered. After having his shadow sewn on by the Russian girl, he promptly demanded that she sew the _other_ foot of the shadow to his _other_ shoe so his shadow could never escape him again.

Her name was Adriadne. Her beautiful ash-colored hair came from her Russian father, and her romantic-sounding name originated in her French mother's ancestry. Although Peter had no inkling as to what these "Russian" and "French" callings were, he understood that Earth was subdivided to an exponential degree, though he did not understand why. In the peak of this conversation with Adriadne, he nearly dared to ask her about Wendy, but in his mind there was one detail he _had_ forgotten—he did not know the "calling" of where she resided.

"Vhy are you here, anyway, Pahn?" Adriadne asked, her spunkiness getting the best of Peter.

"Hmm… Well… I come to Earth, from Neverland, to find anyone like me," he explained. She peered at him quizzically, so he continued. "I was once living here. I lived somewhere around a tall tower. I don't know what happened so that I ended up with Hook, but now I am, so I try to find others who are like me."

Adriadne's bold attitude bloomed wonderfully. "And that's eet? You've been coming to this godforsaken world for countless years, and you say that eet eez only because you want to find someone like you? I doubt that, Peter. I doubt eet." These words stung him. He had never spoken about… Wendy, to anyone. Not ever, ever.

He yanked his foot from Adriadne. "Adriadne, I'm going to go now." Peter never did have that English etiquette.

"Vat? So suddenly?" He nodded. "Peter—Peter Pan! You cannot avoid these very real things that are amess in your life!" She continued yelling out common aphorisms, as most young ladies do in times of distress, but Peter crashed through her glass windows before he could hear. Adriadne had told him that the Nursery and Bombing and Sewing Age had blown away and rotted into the new century of Automobiles and Airplanes. Time had passed, perhaps too much had, since the age in which people believed in the virtues of personal nobility and magnanimous sentiment. Too much time—he had to find her, if only for a few fleeting seconds where he would watch her wither from this world.

For ages, and multiple situations in which agues blasted at his body, Peter had been persisted by a unique question. What is the purpose in flying, they would ask. It was not merely _flying_, not a simple gerund come from the simple verb that elaborated on one's other-world abilities of air-travel. No—he soared. Above the Earth, the water, airplanes, and clouds. Peter flew because it was his livelihood; just as some girls took to sewing or shoe-making, he made an art of traipsing through the cold air, noiseless in form. He flew because he knew that the clock actually ticked, and time had most probably run out. He flew to be free. To search. He flew to fly.

* * *

Sure on this shining night of star-made shadows, kindness must watch for the boy whose heart was lost long ago to the mouth of adventure in sacrifice of true feeling. The shot gold of the skies guided Peter to London; he remembered the Big Ben from his life of then, long before this one of now. North, south, east, west—he knew the cardinal directions instinctively; being a pilot for decades upon decades, Peter's sense of direction was peerless.

**T**he old woman sat in her backyard garden, solemnly swinging on an old tree swing, ignoring the splintering wood beneath her legs. She had lived a happy life, yet now she had been reduced to solitude on a swing at ninety-two years old. Oftentimes the woman wondered where things had started to veer from their original path. When pondering this, she would always reach the same conclusion that her life began to take an alternative route when she met a boy.

On a starry London night, Peter Pan once spied a pretty young lady wearing a bright cerulean dress. He was drawn to her because she told the most fascinating stories to her brothers; a vivid imagination paired with a beautiful soul, Peter never thought he would find another. And he never did. She was… Iridescent. This was also why he decided to pursue her so vehemently at this very moment; too much time had passed since he touched that hand, and he knew that the human life was fleeting.

_Dong… Dong… Dong…_

1854. Solid stone upon stone, bloodied hands piling stones atop one another; a crafted alloy of bronze, copper and earth metals combined to fit the shape of a curved bell, ringing until the day's end. The Big Ben. Peter's heart quickened. His gaze immediately turned downward as the old woman's turned upward. She had been sitting in her rickety swing for quite some time, now; it was with a faint glimmer of a hope that she sat in her London swing, hoping to see that golden cloud lift into the sky. And one can only imagine her surprise when, alas!—she locked eyes with the boy she had been looking for. Quite, one may wonder how this coincidence happened, and question its authority; need I remind one that this is not a coincidence that I recount this story to you, but of the only moment in the history of all living things that this particular boy and girl saw into each other's' souls for the second time in their lives. This is not serendipitous. This is the unique moment that has happened before to many other lovers that I retell to you in the story of Peter and Wendy believing that they are quite sincerely in-love.

"Peter!" She lifted her voice, "Peter Pan!" Wendy—the aging woman—yelled from her swing, her voice crackly and old. It took Peter a moment to reach her, but when he was finally able to confront the woman, it was with immense humility.

"Hello, Wendy." The joy he felt was that of the Herculean triumph of defeating a mortal foe; his joy and relief spilled out onto his face, his heartbeat erratic, and the skin of his face red and porous. Peter removed his hat, nervously tightening it in his hand.

"Peter… It's been so very long. And I am so very old now." She smiled feebly.

In a flurry his emotions from that particular night so long ago shot forward. "Wendy Darling," he said bitingly, "you told me _no_. And now what? Look at you—now look at me. We're opposites, and… it just can't ever come together, ever, ever, Wendy…" He wiped his eyes, frustrated. "This is what I tried to tell you. But you wouldn't let me speak."

She listened quietly, as all good older sisters learn how to do in their life. She also began to cry. "I know, Peter… and I apologize so sincerely," it sounded weak, "but it's a shame that you visit me now, close to a likely eve of my eventual demise."

"Why is it ending like this?" he wondered aloud as he summoned a ball of fairy dust from his hand, signaling that their affinity had been everything and nothing at once. Wendy's body began to lean forward. She lost her grip on the rope of the swing. Peter acted quickly—alarmed, he held her being straight, realizing that the eventual had finally arrived.

"Wendy," he coaxed, looking at her now-distant eyes. "Follow me." He brought his hand to hers, feeling that magnetic pull that once existed between them. Gradually, as he filled their bodies with the light of his other worldly powers, he felt her body growing feebler by the moment, felt the dead weight of her body against his. Slowly, the warmth drained from her hand. Her hair lost its buoyancy. Peter's once-youthful eyes saw the burden of this truth, and thus for the first time in his life, felt the tears fall from his eyes. She was dying. He was alive. And her hair turned to starlight, and all at once Peter felt Wendy's whole being lurch forward—her real body. The bells tolled. Surprised, Peter's eyes met vibrant cerulean-colored ones. Ones he knew a very long time ago…

_He_ kissed her hand. _She_, too, flew.

_let us go then you and i; when the evening is spread out against the sky..._

Wendy, a young lady, wrapped her fingers around Peter's already-placed hand, and he lifted her youthful spirit from the swing. Together, they flew into the peculiarly-illuminated night sky. The second star to the right; it was hidden by the night's illumination. The journey's length was slightly unknown, for there was no need to go straight on until morning, because with no rise of the sun to alert one of when morning would finally arrive. But Peter had traveled there so many times that it was quite instinct and natural a flight. Flying into the high meridian, Peter concluded that to die would be an awfully big adventure, only because of all his years alive, the many humans he visited concluded that visiting the stars would be something spellbinding and fearful—yet with Wendy, Peter felt for once that he was returning home amongst those hallowed stars of the Neverland Kingdom.


End file.
